1) How many books do you have within arms reach at this exact moment? (You can lean over to grab it, but you can't leave your seat)

2) If you could choose an animal familiar, what would it be?

3) True or False - Rocky IV is the quintessential American Cold War Film.

Life

There's a lot going on right now and I feel pretty overwhelmed. I have a job offer that I may or may not take. I'm still trying to figure out how to swing going to college this fall. I've made some new friends recently, one of which is a really cool person who is so much like me in a lot of ways it's pretty amazing and I've also reconnected with some friends I literally haven't seen for months. They're the kind of friends where everyone says "We need to have dinner soon!" and everyone says it with earnesty and enthusiasm, which is amazing.

Spring is finally here and with it comes the sense that literally anything in life is possible. Every year around this time I tell myself "THIS IS GONNA BE MY YEAR" and every year it ends up not being my year, at least not in the way I expect. But whenever I look back, for all the ways I feel like I came up short, I can name just as many ways I grew. I feel genuinely lucky that I'm able to recognize that, because it keeps me going. So once again, I can feel it. This is gonna be my year.

All the movies listed so far are 80s cold war movies (Red October was probably early 90s, but still). The actual correct answer is Dr. Strangelove. It is basically a perfect movie on more levels than I can name.

On a serious note, the reason I prefer war games and strangelove (in principle) is that they're not about a war or invasion per se. There about what happens when we try to remove the human element from the most human activity (politics), and instead let the dispassionate machine decide who dies and when. They do this of course without regard for the fact that it's humans who are driven by fear, prejudice, paranoia, and hatred who are programming the machines. They're stories about how the internal politics of fear will destroy us. To me that's an important story that transcends the cold war. Plus Matthew Broderick.

They're all prisms through which the Cold War can be viewed. My love for War Games also knows no bounds:

I could probably make the argument that Red Scorpion is as worthy of the title as Red Dawn. After all, it's Dolph Lundgren pretending to be Russian again, in Apartheid South Africa pretending to be Afghanistan, produced and with screenplay by Jack-i-shit-you-not-Abramoff. However, considering this statement:

On a serious note, the reason I prefer war games and strangelove (in principle) is that they're not about a war or invasion per se. There about what happens when we try to remove the human element from the most human activity (politics), and instead let the dispassionate machine decide who dies and when.

Strangelove is about the insanity of MAD. Wargames is about our excess trust in technology (which is saved by our childlike insistance that computers are people) Failsafe is about a process we no longer control.

1. Four, the four books doubling as monitor stands. They're all textbooks or reference books. I'm at work, and if I cheat and don't get up but do roll my chair there are two more, including a fantastic power system reference from 1953. It's still applicable today.